The Plague Forge [ARC] (39 page)

Or they don’t see me at all
.

The two were quickly dispatched and then she heard the shouts from the wall, urging her to move. Move
now
. The pall that had settled on her lifted and Tania ran for the gate.

Ten meters away another subhuman came toward her. This one’s single-minded drive toward the Elevator faltered when it noticed her. It slid to a stop, lost its balance, and then righted itself. It screamed at Tania and leapt, filthy hands outstretched.

Tania slid under the attack, rolled in the mud, and came up at a sprint. A chorus of gunshots rang out from the wall and Tania heard something splash into the mud behind her, heavy and final. She didn’t look back.

They were ready for her at the gate, holding it open just enough for her to slip through, and as soon as she did the massive metal door slammed shut behind her.

“What’s wrong?” someone asked, a person she did not know. “Why’d you stay out there?”

Tania shook the cobwebs from her mind. “They weren’t after me,” she said.

A dozen confused stares from the people around her.

“They’re after what we stole.”

The climber slid the last few meters in near-total silence, its motor column producing only a soft whir over the unrelenting storm.

Tania sat in the cargo bay of the
Helios,
the door open so she could watch the climber arrive. Vanessa or Karl, she couldn’t recall which, had thrown a scratchy blanket over her shoulders and handed her a cup of hot tea. Only seconds after the vehicle arrived, Karl returned, the question she knew he would ask apparent in his concerned gaze.

Gunshots still rang out from the perimeter of Camp Exodus. Less frequent than before, the miniature thunderclaps had faded into the landscape.

“I’ll take it up,” Tania said.

“You sure?”

She nodded. “Vanessa can assist me. Besides, we need an immune to open the hatch.”

He stood in the rain, waiting.

Tania let her gaze drift up. Belém’s skyline still hid under the blanket of rainfall. Dark shapes at the edge of vision, like gigantic versions of the aura towers. The fires had finally burned themselves out.

“Load the other cars with the injured, or anyone too weak to fight.” She took a sip of the scalding hot tea and winced as it singed her tongue. “Once we’re above, we’ll send every available climber back down and the evacuation can begin.”

Even in the dim light, under the ashen clouds, she could see his face pale.

“Tania …”

“If they give up before then, fine,” she said, “but we’re going to burn through all our ammunition like this and it might not be enough. We won’t even get a chance to clear the bodies, and without that task accomplished our problems here will only get worse.”

His mouth tightened into a thin line.

“Don’t take this personally, Karl. You’ve done a remarkable job holding out this long. Tell me, how well are the stations provisioned?”

He considered the question, his shame momentarily forgotten. “Melville and Platz have enough for three or four weeks. The farms a bit less. Black Level is running low.”

“It’s a skeleton crew there anyway. I’ll call Greg and Marcus and have them move the staff down to Platz. I could use their help anyway.”

“What about down here?” he asked.

“You tell me.”

He frowned, but he turned and studied the place he held responsibility for. “We’ll lock everything down. I suspect they’ll leave it all alone except the food, most of which will spoil anyway. We’ll need to secure the aura towers well. I don’t think they know how to use them, but they might set them in motion by accident.”

She wanted to say that might not be necessary. That what had happened to her in Colorado signaled an end to the need for the auras. She had no real proof, though, and while she had little in the way of superstition in her personality, a real fear dwelt within her that to voice the idea might doom it somehow. So she said only, “Good. Proceed.”

With that he turned and held a hand out. Tania picked up the bag that held the alien object, took Karl’s offered assistance, and walked to the climber. He helped usher her into the waiting compartment, already packed with the first evacuees and their belongings. The goodbye was short, too short, and she hoped it wouldn’t be their last.

Vanessa came in a few minutes later. Tania offered her the adjacent seat and set the brown bag containing the relic between them on the floor.

As the vehicle rose up through the raging storm clouds that seemed almost a permanent fixture over the city, she wondered if she would ever set foot on Earth again, and what kind of place she would find if she did.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Southern Chad

1.APR.2285

Russell Blackfield stood on the rim of a pit and basked in the incredible sight below him.

I’m inside an aura.

No other explanation made sense, despite the fact that there were no towers around. He should be dead by now, or at least completely insane. Instead he felt stable, and he was finally able to stop his feet. None of the other subs had managed to do that. They rushed forward on either side of him, tumbling over the precipice like lemmings to the sea. They rolled in the grit and sand of the steep-sloped walls, throwing up a cloud that filled Russell’s nostrils and coated his throat. Some of the creatures cried out as they tumbled into the depths. Most seemed oblivious, as if caught in the grip of some ecstatic drug. He’d felt it, too, at first, during his trek through this wasteland. But it had faded.

An aura. A fucking trap just like in Darwin, only here he had no one but a bunch of subs and maybe, just maybe, Skyler and Ana. Of course, they’d leave at the first possible opportunity and had zero incentive now to cart him along. He wanted to laugh and scream all at once. How the hell had he traded the cushy, power-laden confines of Nightcliff and Darwin for this sorry lot?

He closed his eyes to the world, tilted his head back, and howled out this pathetic frustration. Mid-cry he opened his eyes to see the heavens. Might as well include the man upstairs in this curse, too, he figured.

His roar cut off, trapped in his throat as his breath caught in wonder.

A moon hung above him. Not the moon he knew, no. This was something new. Something artificial. Roughly circular in shape and … no, no, it was square. Rounded, yes, but no circle.

It grew larger with each passing moment, and so did Russell’s awe. The surface grew and grew, as big as the sun and then larger still. Not a moon at all, he realized, but something much closer. And not a single object, either. It was some time before he noticed this detail, but gradually it became clear. He was seeing dozens, maybe hundreds of objects, all floating down toward him like …

Yes, like climbers. He’d lain on his rooftop in Nightcliff and watched the mechanical spiders often enough to know that pace, that lazy drift.

But these numbered in the hundreds, and there was no Elevator here, much less a multitude of such devices.

Russell stared, studied, and ignored the growing knot in his gut. The objects continued to fall. They blotted a quarter of the sky now, and he could make out individual details. They were like spikes, some as much as a kilometer tall. All were hexagonal and were made of material identical to the Builder’s shell ship he’d seen while aboard Anchor Station, though each of these dwarfed that object and there were hundreds.

Beside him the subhumans continued to fall helplessly into the pit. Russell, enveloped in a sudden and overwhelming desire for self-preservation, stepped backward. The spikes weren’t falling at all. They were being lowered. Each had its own Elevator cord, exactly like the one in Nightcliff, only multiplied. An array. Blackfield reeled, imagining the lift capability they must have when used together. Darwin’s capacity multiplied by ten and then ten again. But why? There was nothing here but sand. The whole thing would be wasted. They couldn’t even anchor to the ground because …

He glanced down, and understood.

The columns matched the pattern of holes on the alien pyramid’s surface. As this realization crept into Russell’s mind, a cracking sound seemed to tear the very sky apart. He fell, ignoring the spike of pain in each elbow as he landed, and glanced up. The columns glowed with dazzling yellow energy. They rocketed toward the ground with a sudden ferocity, sizzling through the air in a concert of sonic booms. The noise overloaded his ears, shut them down, crippling his mind with a ringing unlike anything he’d ever heard before.

The mass of projectiles hit the pyramid. A strike of overwhelming force had destruction been their purpose. Russell threw an arm over his face and cowered low to the ground, expecting a massive explosion. None came. Hardly anything happened at all, in fact.

Russell sat up and crawled back to the edge of the pit.

Below, as he’d guessed, the columns had impaled themselves perfectly into their matching holes, which dotted the pyramid’s surface. From the tip of each, elevator cords stretched upward until they disappeared against the azure sky.

A fractured noise vibrated through the ground, like a mountain shattering into a thousand pieces. Russell knew then. He knew what the columns were for, what so many Elevator cords were needed to lift.

They weren’t here to lift climbers full of sand. They were here to lift the entire fucking building.

The subs tumbling mindlessly into the abyss, he suddenly realized, were just trying to make the last bus home, or something. Skyler and Ana were probably inside, too, doing God-knows-what. Trapped maybe, or dead.

If Russell didn’t move he’d be left behind, alone in this polluted moonscape of a place, as his last chance at survival, and perhaps redemption, was hauled away.

Fuck that.

He did as the subhumans, then, and dove into the pit, rolling in a choking cloud toward the pyramid below.

Skyler lay on his stomach at the end of a trail of bodies. The dead subhumans covered every centimeter of the long, upward-sloping hallway.

His throat felt dry as the sand outside. In the lull of battle his stomach growled and twisted as if in a death throe of its own.

Ana lay a few meters away, breathing softly. Her eyes were closed but he could tell she had yet to sleep. Behind her sprawled a massive room that dwarfed the one below.

The dark walls sloped inward, soaring to a point high above that hid in shadow. Throughout the space were hundreds of erratically placed columns, no doubt matching the holes Skyler had seen in the pyramid’s surface from above. Light seeped into the room through narrow zigzag lines that ran about the floor in a pattern as alien as the place itself. These produced so little light Skyler almost missed them at first. It was only when he’d lowered the intensity on his rifle’s barrel light that he noticed the trace glow.

Ana stirred, shifted her weight on the hard surface. “Have they finally stopped?” she asked without opening her eyes.

“Doubt it,” Skyler said. He glanced into the shadowy depths of the room. The columns, thick around as a fully loaded climber and tall as a building, stood in silent audience. Motionless, judgmental. “We should explore this room; there could be another way in. Or out.”

The girl sat up. She coughed into her hand. “Did you bring any rations?”

Skyler shook his head. “Running low on ammo, too.” He tried to sound casual and failed miserably.

Ana stood, rolled her head from side to side, and shook feeling back into her hands. “You go ahead and look around. I’ll hold them here.”

“Are you sure?”

With one hand she gave him a swat on the behind, while simultaneously hefting a pistol she’d taken off one of the corpses that littered the facility. She cocked it and leaned against the wall beside the passage entryway.

“Won’t be a minute,” Skyler said.

He kept to the perimeter of the room as best he could. The columns were placed randomly, as far as he could tell, and often were partially embedded into the wall of the chamber. Some were so close together he could not squeeze through the gap between and had to walk around. Without the landmark of Ana’s flashlight playing against the walls beside her, he might have easily become lost in the eerie, silent forest.

Skyler glanced up toward the blackness of the ceiling. His thoughts drifted back to the first time he’d walked among the aura towers in Belém at night. This place wasn’t so different, save for the scale. If he was right, each of these columns was a hollow tube that dipped down into the once-beating heart of this gigantic place. Exhaust tubes, spewing out the SUBS virus in concentrated blasts year after year, taking advantage of every dust storm and stiff wind to further the reach. Presumably each infected being became another, smaller factory, but for whatever reason the Builders had kept this initial source running all this time.

Until now, it seemed.

He yearned to leave, to find out if his efforts had indeed killed the source of the disease. Quietly, in the silent depths of the enormous room, he chuckled to himself. Would he once again get credit for saving everyone and everything? Below Nightcliff he’d been forced to flee into the deep silo, and only an aggressive subhuman’s tackle had sent him careening into the strange iris at the bottom of that pit. What had happened after that he scarcely understood, much less remembered in any detail. Yet he’d done it. He’d short-circuited whatever malfunction had plagued the aura for the months leading up to that moment, and ended the sporadic incursions of subhumans into Darwin and above.

At least those who knew what had happened had the sense to keep it quiet.

More than all this, though, Skyler found in himself a strange desire to return to Darwin. To see Sam, Skadz, and Prumble again. He should have been away from here hours ago to make the agreed rendezvous.

The room began to tremble.

He felt it through the soles of his feet first, and turned to face Ana. She shouted something, a cry of alarm, as the building began to rumble for the second time.
What now?
Skyler thought. The vibration grew more intense, producing an unpleasant tingle up his entire body and rattling his clenched teeth together.